The school-room at Glenfernie gave upon the hill’s steepest, most craglike face.  A door opened on a hand’s-breadth of level turf across from which rose the broken and ruined wall that once had surrounded the keep.  Ivy overgrew this; below a wide and ragged breach a pine had set its roots in the hillside.  Its top rose bushy above the stones.  Beyond the opening, one saw from the school-room, as through a window, field and stream and moor, hill and dale.  The school-room had been some old storehouse or office.  It was stone walled and floored, with three small windows and a fireplace.  Now it contained a long table with a bench and three or four chairs, a desk and shelves for books.  One door opened upon the little green and the wall; a second gave access to a courtyard and the rear of the new house.

Here on a sunny, still August forenoon Strickland and the three Jardines went through the educational routine.  The ages of the pupils were not sufficiently near together to allow of a massed instruction.  The three made three classes.  Jamie and Alice worked in the school-room, under Strickland’s eye.  But Alexander had or took a wider freedom.  It was his wont to prepare his task much where he pleased, coming to the room for recitation or for colloquy upon this or that aspect of knowledge and the attainment thereof.  The irregularity mattered the less as the eldest Jardine combined with a passion for personal liberty and out of doors a passion for knowledge.  Moreover, he liked and trusted Strickland.  He would go far, but not far enough to strain the tutor’s patience.  His father and mother and all about Glenfernie knew his way and in a measure acquiesced.  He had managed to obtain for himself range.  Young as he was, his indrawing, outpushing force was considerable, and was on the way, Strickland thought, to increase in power.  The tutor had for this pupil a mixed feeling.  The one constant in it was interest.  He was to him like a deep lake, clear enough to see that there was something at the bottom that cast conflicting lights and hints of shape.  It might be a lump of gold, or a coil of roots which would send up a water-lily, or it might be something different.  He had a feeling that the depths themselves hardly knew.  Or there might be two things of two natures down there in the lake....

Strickland set Alice to translating a French fable, and Jamie to reconsidering a neglected page of ancient history.  Looking through the west window, he saw that Alexander had taken his geometry out through the great rent in the wall.  Book and student perched beneath the pine-tree, in a crook made by rock and brown root, overhanging the autumn world.  Strickland at his own desk dipped quill into ink-well and continued a letter to a friend in England.  The minutes went by.  From the courtyard came a subdued, cheerful household clack and murmur, voices of men and maids, with once Mrs. Jardine’s genial, vigorous tones, and once the laird’s deep bell note, calling to his dogs.  On the western side fell only the sough of the breeze in the pine.